Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Read online

  The son of an English father and an Australian mother, Leonard was born in Argentina in 1926, and was brought up within the close-knit Anglo-Argentine community of that era. Tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed, he looked and sounded English. ‘You had to keep British because you were the superior race,’ he told me. ‘You’ll never understand that because you never lived it. It was like a religion, Britishness.’ At his school in Buenos Aires province in the 1930s and 1940s, Spanish was taught two hours a day like any other subject. It was a case of ‘when in Rome, do as at home’. Leonard’s notion of Britishness dated from the days when Argentina had the largest Anglo population outside the Empire and was affectionally known as the Sixth Dominion. In fact, he’d only visited the UK once, in the 1930s, during the Depression. He told me he watched the BBC to keep his English ‘up to date’.

  During my first week teaching English at the local agricultural college, Leonard issued an invitation through one of his wife Susanna’s private language students. Word had reached him that an Australian was in town.

  ‘Mr Barton is English,’ said the student, ‘but his grandparents were Australians, so he’d like to meet you.’ She showed me a book, Leonard’s prized copy of A Peculiar People: William Lane’s Australian Utopians in Paraguay by Gavin Souter.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ she said. ‘He’s a little crazy. If you let him, he’ll tell you stories all day.’

  Leonard’s grandparents left Australia for Paraguay on 16 July 1893. That day, the official vessel of the New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association, the Royal Tar, sailed from Sydney Harbour, carrying 220 adult Australians and their children across the Pacific in search of a better life. The National Advocate poured scorn upon the expedition:

  On the assumption that life among wild oranges and yerba mate scrub has capabilities which it does not offer in Australia, one of the most feather headed expeditions ever conceived since Ponce de León started out to find the Fountain of Eternal Youth, or Sir Galahad pursued the Holy Grail, is actually about to set forth.2

  ‘Australia,’ retorted the emigrants, ‘is not the world. The Labor question is a world-wide question…we can best help our fellow-workers here by showing them what can be accomplished, by having faith in each other, and courage enough to try it.’3 Eventually, more than 500 people had the courage to try Paraguay. Leonard’s grandparents, Thomas and Margaret O’Donnell, were among them.

  Thomas had emigrated from Ireland to Queensland in his teens and taken work as a shearer. At 25, he found Margaret Egan, ‘a mere girl at the time’, in a Barcaldine orphanage, where she’d lived since both parents had died in search of gold in the bush. ‘Love is blind, marriage is an eye opener,’ she told her grandson. Margaret was 15 when she gave birth to her first child. And Leonard’s mother, Mary Ann, was only three when industrial strife broke out in Queensland. It would soon drive her parents from the country.

  Like Monte, the central Queensland town of Barcaldine is best known for what happened there in the nineteenth century. Legend has it the Australian Labor Party was founded beneath a straggly ghost gum next to Barcaldine train station during the 1891 Queensland Shearers’ Strike. The strike was triggered by a downturn in the global wool market. When pastoralists tried to pass losses on to their workers – proposing tougher working conditions and demanding freedom of contract – the workers responded by setting up and maintaining strike camps in rural centres for nearly six months. The largest was at Barcaldine. At the height of the conflict, some 10,000 shearers and station hands lived in the camps, with 800 rifles at their disposal. The colonial government put down the strike through a show of overwhelming force designed to deter similar industrial action elsewhere in Australia. They sent in 1400 well-armed troops and jailed all but two of the 14 strike leaders in harsh conditions on the prison island of St Helena, off Brisbane. This crushing defeat for organised labour accelerated the push for working-class parliamentary representation that culminated, in 1904, with the election of the first labour government anywhere in the world. It also provided the impetus for the New Australians’ radical Paraguayan experiment.

  The leader of the movement was the charismatic British-born journalist William Lane. Lane placed advertisements in union newspapers like The Worker and The Boomerang, asking would-be members to surrender their life savings to the organisation, to a minimum commitment of £60. Leonard’s grandfather, ‘fed up with the situation in Australia’, threw in his lot with the Utopians.

  Before the O’Donnells were halfway across the Pacific, cracks had begun to appear in the colonists’ facade of revolutionary comradery. Seasickness, boredom and infighting affected morale during the two-month journey. Margaret O’Donnell recalled to her grandson that William Lane prohibited her and the other young mothers from buying treacle for their children. Treacle was made from molasses, and rum came from molasses – violating Lane’s strict alcohol ban. Scandalised by a romance between two crew members, Lane banned unmarried women on deck after dark, prompting an immediate backlash. Later, there was near mutiny over the loss and ensuing scarcity of cutlery. So fragile is Utopia it can be undone by a shortage of forks. By the time the Tar arrived in Paraguay, its occupants were divided into two factions, the royals, who remained loyal to Lane, and the rebels, who chafed at his autocratic ways.

  Lane’s brand of socialism was puritanical, religiously inflected, and deeply conservative. Many of his founding precepts proved impractical, especially the alcohol ban. Leonard’s grandfather was a teetotaller but made a living in the days of the colony’s decline selling caña, or sugar cane rum, to rebel colonists. It was made clear to members they were not to ‘cross the colour line’ by consorting with Paraguayans. Lane was a fanatical racist, even by the standards of the time. He hoped that the remoteness of the land they had been granted by the Paraguayan government would protect the colony from the pollution of external influences. In fact, it hampered trade that would have made their lives more comfortable.

  The Paraguayans had offered a parcel of nearly 200,000 hectares of good-quality land in the country’s south-east, between two branches of the Tebicuary River. Land grants to European immigrants were common at the time. The country was trying to rebuild after the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), a prolonged and bloody conflict in which the small South American republic took on its powerful neighbours Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, all at once. In the aftermath, missing an entire generation of working-age men, Paraguay offered free land to everyone from German Mennonites to Australian bushmen.

  The New Australia colonists toiled hard and made some progress in the early days in Paraguay. They cleared 40 hectares of land, planted 20 hectares of crops, constructed makeshift dwellings, and built other essential buildings. Thomas O’Donnell started a tannery, dug pits for curing meat, built dams for the cattle, and ran a general store. Margaret, like many of the women who had made the journey out of obligation to their husbands rather than their own convictions, disliked the rough life in the colony.

  By the end of the year, a third of the initial group had left New Australia. Many colonists complained they had been misled by the scouting party’s report on the site, particularly regarding its proximity to the railway line and the river. Others found the rigours of communal living too much. They wanted to barter with the local Guaraní people, but didn’t like the idea of contributing their profits to the public coffer. Some of the single men took a shine to caña and others became romantically involved with Paraguayan women. Lane brought tensions to a head by trying to expel the rebel leaders for breaking the temperance law. When the men refused to leave voluntarily, Lane called in the Paraguayan police and had his opponents forcibly removed. For many of the colonists, the scene of their comrades being dragged off by armed officers was reminiscent of Barcaldine days. The incident sparked a mass exodus from New Australia.

  The colony lasted barely three years in its original form. As Gavin Souter observed: ‘nothing ever quite came up to expectations – crops, i
ndustry, education, or human nature.’4 Accusations of financial mismanagement were levelled at the leadership group; there were cattle rustlers from inside the colony; relations between the first batch of colonists and later arrivals were tense. Many of those who left the colony moved elsewhere in Paraguay or in South America, while others asked for financial assistance from the Australian, Paraguayan and Argentine governments, to help them return home.

  In July 1894, William Lane left with his closest disciples to establish Cosme Colony on a second parcel of land 72 kilometres further south. The poet Mary Gilmore – a true believer in the cause and an intrepid traveller – paid her own passage and journeyed alone from Sydney by ship, paddle-steamer, train and on horseback to join Cosme.5 Back at New Australia, the land was divided into private lots and shared between the few hardy souls who remained. Thomas O’Donnell was among them, but his wife was not. Like the colony itself, Thomas and Margaret’s marriage disintegrated in Paraguay. ‘When poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window,’ Leonard recalled his grandmother saying. The O’Donnells lived apart for the best part of 30 years in old age, but not before having nine children who would grow up in South America and have their own families.

  I visited the village of Nueva Londres, on the site of the old Australian socialist colony in central southern Paraguay, in August 2008. It was a long, rough bus journey, even in the twenty-first century: 1400 kilometres from Buenos Aires. At the border town of Encarnación, on the Paraguayan side of the Paraná River, nobody had heard of the village. After making a couple of phone calls, a ticket seller at the bus station informed me I’d need to travel to a junction in the highway named ‘Kilometre Thirty’ then catch a connection to Coronel Oviedo, the closest town to the settlement.

  With the first bus departing at two in the afternoon, I assumed I’d have plenty of daylight to make the connection and find accommodation. But poor visibility and road conditions meant we didn’t complete the first leg until well after dark. A wild thunderstorm battered the bus, lighting up the grasslands and the thick, sucking red mud at the roadside. Passengers disembarked at an endless series of drop-offs. Kilometre Thirty was little more than two tin-roofed shelters on either side of the highway. Near where I was dropped off, a large group of rough-looking truckers glared at me, drinking the famous caña. As I retreated, a young indigenous woman with a strangely inexpressive face grabbed hold of my arm. The downpour and unexpected appearance of a green-eyed foreigner had triggered something in her. She clung to me across the swampy dirt highway, keening and sobbing at the top of her lungs until I extricated myself and slithered away. I will never forget the sight of her howling in the deluge. The ticket vendor loaded me onto an overcrowded bus and overcharged me. For three or four hours, I stood in the aisle drifting off on my feet, clinging to the overhead luggage rack. At Coronel Oviedo, I disembarked after midnight, found rough lodgings at a roadside inn, and crashed into bed without dinner.

  I awoke sufficiently recovered to continue searching. Originally New Australia under William Lane’s Utopians, the village became Colonia Stroessner during the reign of Paraguay’s Cold War–era strongman and, after democracy returned in 1992, was finally renamed Nueva Londres (New London) by the new mayor, in honour of his own British heritage. I trudged past a chaotic array of fast-food bars, kiosks and auto repair shops and finally encountered the Coronel Oviedo bus station. There, I was told that the colectivo to Nueva Londres would arrive at half past ten. A little after eleven, I asked again, and was told it wasn’t running because of last night’s rain. Soon, I found myself clinging to the back of a Paraguayan taxi driver named Alberto, who cautiously negotiated the traffic on Ruta 2 on his little red Honda motorcycle and took the turn-off to Nueva Londres. Excitement rippled through me as we passed beneath the sign for the village, which I had seen in photos. Finally, the sun was shining in Paraguay. Dew sparkled on the pastures. Stands of dense monte scrub rose from the plains at a distance from the highway, and we passed many straggly groves of orange trees, a legacy of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Narrow, fast-flowing streams snaked through the fields, and waist-high red anthills dotted the plains. I remembered a passage from Mary Gilmore’s diaries describing owls sitting on the anthills at sundown, eyes gleaming in the Paraguayan dusk.

  About half an hour after we set out, Alberto dropped me in the shady plaza at the centre of Nueva Londres. The H-shaped monument was in such a bad state of repair that most of the names etched into the metal were illegible. The few I could make out were Spanish and didn’t seem to have any relation to the Australian colonists. As I walked around the village, many of the street names were familiar from my reading about the colony. The main road was the calle Ricardo L. Smith. Cattle and horses wandered the fringes of the settlement. Kids buzzed about on motorbikes. The red-earth roads were rutted and muddy. Puddles reflected the Paraguayan sky. The streets were mostly empty as the hour of the siesta approached, but smoke was billowing from a backyard parilla. I could smell barbequed meat and hear somebody, far off, blowing a major scale on the trumpet. Because it was the weekend, the office of the municipal government was closed and it was not easy to work out who to talk to. A local teenager suggested I visit señora Iris Kennedy, who lived in the white house on the plaza in front of the school and would be able to tell me about the town’s history. The boy told me I was the third Australian to blunder into the village that year. ‘Every year four or five foreigners come.’

  La señora Kennedy had hosted overseas visitors before. She ushered me into her living room and insisted, despite my protests, on serving me a glass of milk fresh from her family’s own cows. She told me she still understood some English when she heard it, but that she wasn’t able to speak the language. All the English speakers had died out, she told me in Spanish, even Don Eduardo, who for a long time hosted the bulk of Australian visitors. Now that role had fallen to her. I remembered that her uncle, Juan Kennedy, featured heavily in Anne Whitehead’s account of the colony.6 Iris Kennedy was a petite woman in her seventies, with lively, darting green eyes and white hair. She told me memory of the Australian colony was dying out in Nueva Londres.

  ‘We are all Paraguayan now.’

  The villagers were more concerned with present-day living conditions than the past. The bus service that had let me down apparently no longer runs at all, leaving local residents reliant on private vehicles, moto-taxis and a community minibus that intermittently ferries children to school in town. Iris Kennedy described how a younger relative used to leave to attend the nearest university in Villarrica at seven in the morning and return at eleven o’clock at night. When I asked for her address, she told me the postal service no longer operates.

  She wasn’t comfortable talking about the colony beyond the brief, rehearsed spiel that she gave when I first arrived. Paraguayans weren’t interested in that part of their history, she insisted. ‘We have no culture,’ she kept saying. Iris said she hadn’t been to school beyond the sixth grade, but she was extremely proud of her daughter, who had become a teacher at the local primary school. This, she told us, was the most Paraguayans could hope for: to work hard and to give their children a better life. The country had great hopes for the new president, she said. President Lugo, a progressive former priest, was the first Paraguayan leader in 60 years not from the conservative Colorado Party. But Paraguayans ‘couldn’t afford too much hope’. She was right about that. Five years later, President Lugo was impeached on dubious grounds and Colorado rule was restored.

  As with Leonard Barton, one of the remaining signs of Iris’s heritage was her cooking. She boasted of her repertoire of Australian and English recipes, including cakes, biscuits and brownies. Señora Kennedy remembered the name of Thomas O’Donnell, Leonard’s grandfather, but she had never met him. After we’d chatted for an hour, she showed me the bananas, pears, peaches and chillies planted in her garden (‘I just planted the chillies because I like the colour’). Not wishing to impose on h
er hospitality any further, I thanked her and took my leave.

  There was no sign of Alberto, despite his solemn promise to return to the plaza and pick me up, so I walked 8 kilometres out of the colony through the gorgeous countryside, all the way back to the highway. I have rarely been happier than I was that day when I came upon a horse-drawn cart, old enough for me to imagine it might be a relic of the colony, abandoned on its side, in the lush Paraguayan grass. I sat beside it and puzzled over Thomas More’s lovely sixteenth-century coinage. How could somewhere be both a good place and no place? I wondered that afternoon, on the road out of Nueva Londres, if it might be best to think of Utopia as temporal rather than spatial, a mental state rather than a physical location. In that case, instead of suggesting an unachievable ideal, it might imply a feeling all of us will experience – momentarily – in our lifetime. In the long grass at the roadside, eating an orange in drenching sunlight, I was there for a good half-hour.

  Leonard’s mother, Mary Ann, spent her childhood helping out in her father’s general store in the colony. She and her sister Hanna wrote on the goods in secret code so they would know how much they were allowed to discount the price of each item. The two were forbidden to speak Guaraní, the local language, as it would ‘make them familiar to the natives’. Both escaped the limited world of the colony through marriage, Hanna marrying an engineer, Bob Green, and Mary Ann an English railwayman, William Allan Barton.